Strength/Flexibility Relationship

Sep 20, 2016

There are times in the clinic where I am assessing clients experience tightness in various muscle groups.   I often hear the comment:  “I stretch or roll all the time but it is always tight and I don’t know how to fix this.”  Why does that muscle stay tight?  What is the cause of the tightness?

When we talk about muscle tightness we often think about muscles lacking length or shortening, however, structurally this is not happening.  Actual contractures do occur, but they are usually a result of a more systemic condition caused by prolonged disuse of muscles (long hospital stay with extended bed rest).   Looking at this from a neuromuscular perspective helps to shed light on the issue.   Our nervous system is actually responding to sensory feedback at the muscle or joint site by shortening the muscle to protect it.     Possible causes of this sensory feedback can include.  

  1. An acute injury to the joint, tendon, ligament or muscle itself.  
  2. More commonly, as witnessed in my clinic, it is due to overloading a muscle beyond its capacity.   This can be as a result of overtraining, repetitive work, or prolonged positions.  

Looking closer at the second cause, we overload the muscle as we stress our muscular system through sport or work.   Our nervous system senses the overload of the muscle and responds by tightening the muscle or sends pain feedback to warn that that muscle is overworked.   The cycle will persist and potentially worsen as you continue to overload the muscle through the repetitive stress process.  Now that the muscle is being held in the shortened or tight position our body relies on the tightness of the muscle rather than the muscle strength itself.   As a result the muscle becomes weaker.   

So what do we do?  How do we get our nervous system to relax that tightened muscle?   Stretching statically (holding a stretch position for 15-30 sec) is one way to temporarily cause our nervous system to relax the muscle, however, this is a short term solution as we will only see temporary changes to the flexibility of the muscle.   Long term we need to make that muscle more resilient to the repetitive stress we put on it.   A progressive and extended strength program is needed to help improve the overall flexibility to that muscle.

Why does this work?  As we slowly strengthen the muscle we gain more muscle fibre and the tissue itself becomes more resilient to the stress we put on it and as a result the negative feedback to our muscle system becomes less, resulting in the muscle become “looser”.   It is an often believed that we are strengthening through the activity that we are doing (i.e. turning a wrench or a tempo run).   This is true to some extent but since the activity is what caused our muscle to tighten, that same stimulus will likely cause our nervous system to provide the same result, a tight muscle.    A progressive strength program works better than the activity itself because:

  1. Isolating the muscle through a specific exercise, takes away any compensatory muscle activity that may have begun to occur around the tight muscle; 
  2. It is a different stimulus than the one that caused the tightness originally; and
  3. If we progressively strengthen, the muscle will properly adapt to the stress by getting stronger rather than tightening up.

The changes in strength can take time and it can be a bit of trial and error process determining how and when to progress the strength, but the end result is worth it as it will be result in more of a permanent fix to your issues.  



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